Walter Isaacson Quotes

"Throughout his life, Albert Einstein would retain the intuition and the awe of a child. He never lost his sense of wonder at the magic of nature's phenomena-magnetic fields, gravity, inertia, acceleration, light beams-which grown-ups find so commonplace. He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell an underlying unity. "People like you and me never grow old," he wrote a friend later in life. "We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.

What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.

"Steve Jobs had a tendency to see things in a binary way: "A person was either a hero or a bozo, a product was either amazing or shit

if you can't keep him interested, that's your fault.

Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.

Este es un homenaje a los locos. A los inadaptados. A los rebeldes. A los alborotadores. A las fichas redondas en los huecos cuadrados. A los que ven las cosas de forma diferente. A ellos no les gustan las reglas, y no sienten ningún respeto por el statu quo. Puedes citarlos, discrepar de ellos, glorificarlos o vilipendiarlos. Casi lo único que no puedes hacer es ignorarlos. Porque ellos cambian las cosas. Son los que hacen avanzar al género humano. Y aunque algunos los vean como a locos, nosotros vemos su genio. Porque las personas que están lo suficientemente locas como para pensar que pueden cambiar el mundo... son quienes lo cambian

"The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,” he said. "The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.

The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music.

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think, he [Einstein] said.

So that’s our approach. Very simple, and we’re really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.” Apple’s design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you're not busy being born, you're busy dying.

Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. “There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around him,” Cook said. “That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that.

I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.

The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand,

One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness. Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.